Fading Your Prompts When Teaching Your Child To Use Sentences
It is better to work on teaching your child to use this general “sentence frame’” (Person’s name IS action word) rather than teaching him to memorize individual pictures. For this reason, you will be keeping track of whether or not your child needed prompts for the set of 6 pictures. It doesn’t matter which pictures he needed help with and which he was able to do on his own. So, for example, if you do 10 trials, 3 of Mommy eating, 2 of Daddy reading, 2 of Daddy eating, and 1 of Mommy drinking, and your child needs help on 9 of the trials and does 1 all by himself, you would record that he was independent and correct 1/10 times or 10%. You don’t need to specify which pictures in the grouping were correct and independent and which he needed help with. Just rotate through the pictures and keep track of how many times in each set of 10 trials your child is able to make a sentence to describe the picture, all by himself. For a while, you can expect that you will need to help him most of the time.
Once your child is able to use a sentence to describe any of your first 6 pictures, add another set of 6 pictures. You could add a third familiar person doing these same three actions, or you could add pictures of the same two family members doing a different set of actions, for example cooking, sleeping or washing. And you can continue to add groups of three to six of the pictures you have taken for this teaching program until your child learns this sentence frame well and can use it to describe even new pictures accurately, in at least 8 out of every 10 trials.
Do not worry about adding the object of the action. For example, in this case, you would not worry about having your child add the word “apple” for the time being. You can work on expanding the sentences once your child has the basic idea down first. Of course, if he adds it in spontaneously, praise him enthusiastically.
Fading Your Prompts
Once your child can say the sentence without any prompting, begin to eliminate one picture prompt at a time. For example, in this case you could begin by just continuing to hold up the picture of Mommy eating the apple in front of your child, instead of placing it on the table, to the right of the “is” card. Ask your child to tell you what’s happening. Then point to the other pictures, just as you did before, and when you get to the space after the “IS” card, just point to the empty space.
Wait for a second or two and if your child does not say the word “eating,” prompt him to do so using a verbal imitation prompt. You can do this a couple of times in a row, fading your prompts across successive trials.
Another idea, instead of leaving the space for the action-word blank, is to put an underline or a large dot there to show that there is a missing word. Either way, you may still need to go back to giving a verbal model for a few trials when you begin to fade the pictures. That’s OK.
In any case, point to the space, the underline, or the dot when it is time for him to label the action-word and see if he fills it in. If he does not, just prompt him using a verbal imitation prompt. Give him as much help as he needs and fade your prompts gradually, over time. Once your child is saying all three words by himself with the action-word picture removed, you should eliminate the other picture so that only the word “IS” remains as a visual prompt.
Of course, you could add underlines or dots to show where the words belong if you like.
The last prompt to fade is the “IS” card. At that point, simply hold up the picture and ask your child, “What’s happening?” Use verbal imitation prompts as needed. In the next clip, watch how the teacher fades all of the text prompts, one at a time, until the little boy is making the sentence all by himself.
Once you get to the point where you are holding up any of your pictures of familiar people doing a single action, and your child is able to tell you what’s happening in all of the pictures without any picture prompts, you should stop asking the question, “What’s happening?” on every trial. You should ask occasionally, but most of the time, just hold the picture up in front of your child and give him an expectant look.
If your child doesn’t respond when you just hold up the pictures without asking, “What’s happening?”, use a partial verbal model prompt, for example, you could say, “Mommy is” or even just “Mooommmmmmy”, holding out the sounds and using a rising tone to let him know that there is more to say and that he should be the one to say it.
Here’s another way to practice mastered sentence structure pictures.
Remember, you do not need to keep track of individual pictures or even individual people or actions. Instead you should be keeping track of how independent your child becomes with the process. You can do this by scoring a “P” if your child requires one or more prompts (visual prompts, verbal prompts or both) to make a sentence that describes the picture and “+” if he does it by himself, without your verbal model and without any visual prompts (like the pictures, the “Is” card, the dots, etc.).